About two hours after you put the crawdads in the bucket they start to smell. They can’t survive out of the creek. They need to crouch under a flat smooth rock in steady current.

None of us had a plan beyond the plop in the bucket. It wasn’t holding them or even looking at them – no, the thrill was the find, just like in all fishing and hunting. What you do with your captive or kill is just to justify the initial thrill.

And nobody was going to eat a West Virginia crawdad. The streams were latrines for cattle, at least, and maybe for your upstream neighbors, since buried in their streambanks were mysterious iron pipes emptying gray water. (It wasn’t till I was grown that I heard the word ”crayfish” and learned of whiskery delicacies eaten by exotic people groups. With butter.)

The thrill of the find, I say. Like a word search or an Easter egg hunt. (Nobody really wants to eat Easter eggs, either.)

I’m sorry to say we usually lost interest after we plopped them into the bucket and went off to play. Only maybe we’d come back to check the bucket right around sundown, before time to go home, and find them unmoving, or floating creepy-legged up, and already smelling. We didn’t intend to kill them, we just forgot.